● 09.02.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 02/09/2023: Release of Linux From Scratch and Nitrux 3.0 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 2:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• Let me be frank. Once upon the time, was a Windows user. Then was happy to have to use OSX for a transition to GNU Linux.

Kernel Space

Applications

• There are no actual release notes, but a bunch of stuff got added. Code is here. Many of these were things needed by Inkscape for its new CMYK PDF exporter. More info about that can be found on DoctorMo’s YouTube channel.

• RustPlayer is an audio player that plays locally hosted files. It’s also a radio player.

• This article highlights the best genealogy software that runs under Linux.

Instructionals/Technical

idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Kodi Media Server on AlmaLinux 9. Kodi, a versatile and highly acclaimed media center software, has gained a dedicated following due to its capability to transform your computer into a multimedia powerhouse.

• In today’s data-driven world, databases serve as the backbone of countless applications, from e-commerce platforms to social media networks. Among the diverse array of databases available, SQL and NoSQL stand out as the two primary categories, each with distinct characteristics and benefits.

• In the recent update of Ubuntu 23.10 daily build, the GNOME desktop has been updated to v45 beta. And, here are some visual changes. The default wallpaper now has a dark variant. Meaning changing Ubuntu Desktop to dark style will also change to dark style wallpaper. Though, the final wallpaper is not revealed yet!

• Shared Folders feature does not work for your OS in VirtualBox Virtual Machine? Here’s a quick workaround to transfer files between host and VMs. VirtualBox has port forwarding feature that allows to access a service or an app running in VM from the host or even the internet.

• Learn to use the du command with sorted output based on size.

• Here are some tips on deploying generative models as microservices with Kubernetes.

• There are cases when screen resolution doesn’t get adjusted automatically after installing a new monitor on your computer.

• This happens mostly because of faulty drivers, or when wrong drivers are in use. However, sometimes you need to adjust screen resolution manually in order to make the monitor usable.

WINE or Emulation

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Another busy week in the KDE snap world. Most of the release-service apps are in –candidate channel waiting to be tested. Testing is the bottle neck in the process, so I am trying something new and calling for help! Please test your favorite apps and report on https://discuss.kde.org/t/all-things-snaps-questions-concerns-praise/ any issues and which apps tested. Thanks!

• I believe I have a solution for our PIM applications by creating an Akondai dbus provider snap and setting all the PIM applications as consumers. I am waiting for manual review to pass.

• One central topic of this year’s Akademy was energy efficiency and performance of software. I took this occasion to give KRunner another look in regard to profiling, because the multithreading refactor simplified lots of plugin code and allowed for more optimizations.

• When I did some benchmarking around two years ago, one of my major performance surprises was the windowed widgets runner. This runner queried all available applets for each letter typed.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• By now it is probably no longer news to many: GNOME Shell moved from GJS’ own custom imports system to standard JavaScript modules (ESM).

• JavaScript originated in web browsers to add a bit of interactivity to otherwise static pages. There was no need to split up small code snippets into multiple files, so the language did not provide a mechanism for that.

• This did become an issue when people started writing bigger programs in JavaScript, so environments like node.js and GJS added their own import systems to organize code into multiple files. As a consequence, developers and tooling had a hard time transitioning from one environment to another.

• That changed in 2015 when ECMAScript 6 standardized modules, resulting in a well-defined, widely-supported syntax supported by all major JavaScript engines. GJS has supported ESModules since 2021, but porting GNOME Shell was a much bigger task that had to be done all at once.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• The Linux From Scratch community is pleased to announce the release of LFS Version 12.0, LFS Version 12.0 (systemd), BLFS Version 12.0, and BLFS Version 12.0 (systemd).

• Powered by the Liquorix-flavored Linux 6.4.12 kernel, Nitrux 3.0 is here with the latest KDE Plasma 5.27.7 LTS desktop environment on top of Wayland and using a Git snapshot of the upcoming Mesa 23.3 open-source graphics stack for hardcore Linux gamers.

• As the headline suggests, Nitrux 3.0 brings improvements to the boot process to improve hardware support by implementing a check in the Kernel Boot tool to verify the presence of the NVIDIA proprietary driver and restrict it from being used on computers with NVIDIA hardware.

• Last post, I left off on the problem where the select functionality was working but there are some problems as it works but not well as the average latency is above 2000ms and when using ping it drops more than 60% of packets on average. For two weeks I was working on this issue but I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with select and given that I was coming up on the deadline of my project, I decided to go with a condition variable approach when reading data from the driver for both the application and interface side. For the application side, it does have a timeout on it so that write can also take place since OpenVPN uses select/poll which will check if both read and write can happen at the same time, and since I am blocking one of them, it would just infinitely block both operations until read was fine. While select functionality is something that should be implemented with the driver, timing was not on my side with this issue so for those who want to take more of a crack at finding out what the problem is, here was how I tested it: [...]

Reviews

• First impressions start with the outside look and while I was concerned about that the silver colour would get on my nerves – it is OK really.

• What is not just OK, but abso-bloody-lutely amazing is the custom engraving on the laptop lid Slimbook did for me. It is a Conan Gasket fractal and I have to thank María Hornos at Slimbook for both patience and perseverance in making this engraving a reality.

BSD

• Hackaday ran a story about Vim with some interesting history. I knew the late Bram Moolenaar had started the project on the Amiga, though I didn’t know the history of the original code going back to Tim Thompson’s Stevie on the Atari ST, and the ports made by Tony Andrews. I swear the world is conspiring to get me into buying a 520 or 1040ST.

• On Vim, Modal Interfaces And The Way We Interact With Computers

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

• The August Edition of PCLinuxOS KDE is now available.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

• The move of OBS to the new data center has been completed and issues we had seen as a consequence of this are mostly fixed (all in working order, some performance not exactly where it used to be, but in a workable state). Yet, we only managed to release a single, small snapshot during this week: 20230828. Two more made it to QA but had to be discarded for bugs identified which slipped Staging.

• Snapshot 0828 was, as mentioned small, and only brought you those changes over 0823: [...]

• In a few weeks saptune 3.1 will reach the public repositories of SLES for SAP Applications. Time to talk about the changes and new features.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Red Hat Inc. and Google Cloud have been collaborating for more than 11 years in migrating customers to the cloud platform. At the heart of this partnership is Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL, which provides an operating system backbone to streamline operations from datacenter to cloud and out to the edge.

Debian Family

• The 8th monthly Sparky project and donate report of the 2023: – Linux kernel updated up to 6.5.0, 6.1.50-LTS, 5.15.129-LTS – Sparky packages of Linux kernel moved from ‘unstable’ repo to ‘core’; the ‘unstable’ repo made misunderstanding of many users thinking that the packages of Debian unstable repo are available to all Sparky branches [...]

• Designers, don’t miss the Armbian Desktop Wallpaper Contest – an excellent opportunity for anyone to have their work featured on Armbian.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Hi everyone, We received 474 donations in July. I’m always amazed when I see these numbers. It’s both humbling and highly motivating to picture that many people enjoying what we do and wanting to help us. I really appreciate it. Many thanks for your support and these donations!

Devices/Embedded

• Last Updated on 1st September 2023 by peppe8o This tutorial will show you how to install CasaOS on Raspberry PI computer boards.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Datepicker and calendar JavaScript libraries are open-source tools that developers can use to add date and time selection functionality to their web applications. These libraries provide pre-built components that can be easily integrated into a project, saving time and effort.

• Data recovery is the process of salvaging and restoring data that has been lost, corrupted, or made inaccessible. This can be done through a variety of means, including software-based recovery tools, hardware repair, and forensic recovery techniques.

• Google Maps is a web mapping service developed by Google. It offers satellite imagery, street maps, panoramic views of streets, real-time traffic conditions, and route planning for traveling by foot, car, bicycle or public transportation.

Events

• Sriram invited me to the oneAPI meetup, and I felt I hadn’t summed up the state of compute and community development in a while. Enjoy 45 minutes of opinions!

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Chromium

• Chromium, regular and un-googled. Google is speeding up its Chromium release cycle. Let’s see if I can keep up since I also build the -ungoogled variant. The latest update is 116.0.5845.140 and addresses a vulnerability. You can now upgrade to my latest chromium and chromium-ungoogled packages.

GNU Projects

• The GNU System is turning forty. In honor of this event, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is organizing a hackday for families, students, and anyone interested in hacking. Come and celebrate with us with kith and kin!

Programming/Development

• Had better report on this, as rapid changes. Already posted about mime handling for .xbps packages:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202308/mime-handling-for-void-linux-xbps-packages.html

• The target is to build EasyOS from Void Linux .xbps packages. The great thing is that heaps of work has been done for this in Woof-CE.

Leftovers

• Early this month I arrived at work to see a Concorde parked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It’s been fun to identify the ships docked there, but an airplane was new, especially such a rare one. I guess a lot of airplane knowledge from my childhood has stayed with me, and being greeted by this Concorde, and watching the new Top Gun has brought it back.

Science

Hardware

• One of the delights of the boring pre-VGA era is that you get to express your creativity when it comes to making a random color CRT work with an equally exciting dual CPU computer like the DEC Rainbow 100. This is the situation that the folk over at Usagi Electric found themselves in with a recent project. The Rainbow 100 is an interesting computer in that it can boot not only DOS with its 8088 processor, but also CP/M on the Z80 processor. Although generally used in monochrome mode, it supports a color graphic card to output RGB signals via its male DB15 connector.

• I received an early sample of the CrowView 14-inch laptop monitor for review a few weeks ago, and regular readers may have seen me already use it in some mini PC reviews, but I’ve yet to review the monitor itself, so I’ll report my experience using both laptops and mini PCs running Windows 11 and Ubuntu 22.04. CrowView laptop monitor unboxing The display ships in a retail package highlighting the main features of the display such as its Full HD resolution, compatibility with 13 to 16.5-inch laptop displays, 160° viewing angle, and its mechanical clamping mechanism. The CrowView display ships with a 12V/2A power supply, USB-A to USB-C and USB-C to USB-C cables, an HDMI to mini HDMI cable, a velcro tie, some stickers, and a user manual in English.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• I’ve extended the house with a large glassed area. We call it the orangeri, which is a lie, since what grows there are lemons. So how do you grow lemons in Sweden?

• First of all, you have a hole straight through the construction of your house all the way down to the soil underneath.

• Don’t try to force it.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Chinese tech giant Baidu rolled out its ChatGPT-like ERNIE Bot to the public on Thursday. But the app is highly censored, offering state-approved answers to taboo questions and sometimes refusing to process them altogether when AFP tested the service.

Security

• The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 249. This version includes the following changes: [...]

• A Brazilian spyware app vendor was hacked by activists:

• Weekly cybersecurity news roundup providing a summary of noteworthy stories that might have slipped under the radar.

• Exploit code and root-cause analysis released by SinSinology documents the problem as a case where VMWare “forgot to regenerate” SSH keys.

• DShield honeypots collect a variety of data, including passwords, that are submitted from SSH and telnet attacks.

• EclecticIQ has released a free decryption tool to help victims of the Key Group ransomware recover their data without paying a ransom.

• Industry professionals comment on the law enforcement operation targeting the Qakbot botnet and its implications.

• Cisco has observed multiple threat actors adopting the SapphireStealer information stealer after its source code was released on GitHub.

• The National Cyber Security Centre provides details on prompt injection and data poisoning attacks so organizations using machine-learning models can mitigate the risks.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The subscription plan is a response to European Union policies and court rulings to restrict Meta’s data-collection practices.

• An advocacy group is starting a $2 million campaign calling for the company to better police materials on its products and services.

• Twitter has updated its privacy policies, which will allow for the collection of biometric data and employment history, among other information.

Defence/Aggression

• French investigating magistrates have dropped their case against three gendarmes over the 2016 death of a young black man in custody that sparked violent protests, lawyers said Friday.

• Hong Kong authorities continued their campaign against those with links to eight wanted overseas activists, with their family members and associates “taken” from their homes for offices for questioning. Additionally, 12 people with connections to a defunct 2019 protester relief fund were arrested almost two years after it ceased operations.

• In recent years, a new center of insecurity has emerged in the extreme southwest of Niger, a region known as the “three borders” (Niger-Mali-Burkina Faso) where terrorist groups often carry out deadly attacks targeting both military and civilian population.

• They will provide security for a regional sporting event in November and national elections in 2024.

• The family of Ta’Kiya Young said that her death outside a supermarket in Ohio was “not only avoidable, but also a gross misuse of power and authority.”

• Trade, investment, regional and international security will be discussed during the dialogue.

• More than two years after the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, thousands of Afghan evacuees seeking to come to the United States remain arbitrarily detained in other countries like Qatar, Kosovo and the United Arab Emirates. Many of the Afghans are living in camps that are largely coordinated, facilitated or under the control of the U.S. government. The Center for Constitutional Rights and the civil rights group Muslim Advocates recently sued the Pentagon, State Department and the Department of Homeland Security seeking governmental records about the relocation and detention of Afghan evacuees. “What this lawsuit hopes to achieve is to provide more information to humanitarian, human rights and civil society organizations … to intervene and prevent the continued detention of these Afghan civilians,” says CCR attorney Sadaf Doost.

Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

• Russia said its forces destroyed Ukrainian naval drones that were attempting to target the Crimea bridge early on Saturday. Kyiv has repeatedly targeted the strategic bridge that connects the Russian mainland to the peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014.

• Ukrainian children on Friday began their second school year since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, forcing classes online and in underground bomb shelters in several parts of the country. More than 1,300 Ukrainian schools were destroyed over the past 18 months, but the dangers will not stop Ukrainian children from going back to school again.

• Russia’s defence ministry on Friday said it had destroyed a total of 281 Ukrainian drones over the past week. Also on Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told a business forum in Italy that there can be no “sustainable peace” in Ukraine unless the country regains control of Crimea, Donbas and other territories occupied by Russia.

• But that’s no excuse to overlook declining physical and mental health of over a million refugees, they add.

• U.S. national-security adviser Jake Sullivan met on September 1 with the heads of Ukrainian anti-corruption institutions and reiterated American support for anti-corruption reforms in Ukraine, the White House said in a statement.

• Russia has said that its forces thwarted three sea drone attacks on the strategic Crimean Bridge linking Ukraine’s occupied Crimean Peninsula to the Russian mainland, as Ukraine’s military said it was continuing its push toward the southeastern city of Melitopol.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is expected to attend the annual gathering of world leaders at the United Nations in New York this month and take part in a UN Security Council meeting on Ukraine.

• Russia’s Second Western District Military Court has sentenced Ramazan Murtuzov to 15 years in prison for allegedly preparing an explosion in a shopping center or train station in the city of Kursk, near the border with Ukraine.

• Police in Kyiv said bomb threats to the city’s schools were registered on September 1, the first day of the new school year.

• Two cargo vessels have left a port near Odesa, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister said on September 1 — the third and fourth to transit from deep-water Ukrainian ports through the Black Sea since Russia withdrew from a safe-passage deal for grain ships.

• Sometimes the noise is distant artillery, at others it’s the lawnmower next door: In the far east of Ukraine, on a river meandering its way through the forests, there is a village where people can take a break from war. But it is never far away.

• The long-established Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is threatening to disintegrate because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Critics claim Moscow is infiltrating the organization and sabotaging its work in ensuring European peace and stability.

• In her farewell speech, Sanna Marin thanked Finland for its unanimous support of Ukraine.

• The Dutch have played an outsize role in aiding Ukraine. Now they might set an example against Russian-style ethnic nationalism.

• As Ukraine pushes slowly forward in its counteroffensive, it’s relying heavily on the effort of hundreds of small-scale assault groups, each tasked with attacking a single trench, tree line or house.

• Discussion of a Plan B, should Ukraine fail to win a total victory, has become more fraught than ever, say those who have tried.

• More than 25 thousand Russian citizens living in Latvia have their permanent residence permits expire on September 1. About 19 thousand people have applied for the status renewal or are planning to do so. A little over 800 people have applied for a temporary permit. The others have done nothing to get a residence permit, Latvian Radio reported.

• A court in western Lithuania has issued an arrest warrant for a man who is suspected of abducting his child and illegally crossing the Lithuanian-Russian state border.

• A law requiring taxi companies to provide the Federal Security Service (FSB) with data on riders’ trips has come into force.

• Protests in support of the pro-Russian leader of the mostly Serb-populated entity of Bosnia-Herzegovina, who has been indicted for disrespecting the decisions of the Office of the High Representative (OHR), took place on September 1 in several locations across Bosnia.

• Several Swedish lawmakers said on September 1 they will boycott this year’s Nobel Prize award ceremonies on December 10 after the private foundation that administers the prestigious awards changed its position from a year earlier and invited representatives of Russia, Belarus, and Iran to attend.

• Denmark on September 1 informed Russia’s ambassador in Copenhagen that it must reduce its embassy staff to the same number that Denmark has in Moscow because talks to increase numbers have foundered.

• An estimated 2,500 troops from the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) have opened military exercises in parts of Belarus that border NATO members Poland and Lithuania.

• In March, Russia began a voluntary reduction in oil production by 500,000 barrels per day.

• FM Lavrov and Fidan discussed the initiative to supply up to one million tons of Russian grain to Turkey at a discounted price for it to be further sent to countries in need.

• The executive director of the Nobel Foundation said it was reversing course from a year ago in an effort lower tensions at a time of growing geopolitical divisions.

• The mother and father who took their children from a care home and were detained when attempting to flee to Belarus were released from detention on Friday.

• Representatives from the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia are taking part in the competitions.

Environment

• Hongkongers on Friday hunkered down for Super Typhoon Saola, as the Observatory announced the T9 storm signal at 6.20 pm, saying that the storm was expected to skirt within 40 kilometres of the city. A Government Flying Service aircraft captured meteorological data near Super Typhoon Saola on Friday morning.

Energy/Transportation

• The White House has launched a fresh attempt to speed domestic electric vehicle production while allaying labor fears about the transition from gasoline to plugs.

Finance

• Commercial banks and other credit institutions operating in Lithuania have paid 56 million euros in the so-called temporary solidarity contributions for the second quarter of 2023, preliminary figures from the Finance Ministry showed on Friday.

• The U.S. economy added 187,000 jobs in August, while the unemployment rate rose to 3.8%, the Labor Department said on Friday.

• Why it matters: Employers added jobs at a slighter quicker pace than economists expected, while the unemployment rate jumped as more workers joined the labor force.

• Where it stands: The number is a bit more than the 170,000 payrolls forecasters anticipated.

• Cybersecurity provider Malwarebytes Inc. has laid off more than 100 workers amid a restructuring initiative that will see it split into two companies. TechCrunch first reported the move on Thursday, citing a former Malwarebytes employee. Marcin Kleczynski, the company’s chief executive, confirmed the layoffs to the publication.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• In a tweet that has gone viral, a far-right Dutch politician known for his anti-Islam stance has claimed there is a “market” in Ethiopia where Muslim women are being sold, with a video to back it up. In the images, a crowd can be seen surrounding people kneeling on the ground and covered in white cloth. However, the video has been taken out of context: it actually shows young Senegalese boys taking part in an initiation rite, and has nothing to do with slavery.

Censorship/Free Speech

• A N.J. judge has thrown out the lawsuit, on the narrow grounds that, even if the newspaper deliberately discouraged people from attending the group’s charity gala, the N.J. Law Against Discrimination doesn’t apply to charity galas.

• A satirical Arabic website, much like The Onion, poked fun at a royal wedding in Jordan in June. Not long after, it was blocked. “We’re totally backsliding,” said one cartoonist in the kingdom.

• The district is still censoring the Gadsden flag patch as well as Second Amendment advocacy, according to FIRE.

• From FIRE’s letter sent yesterday to the Superintendent of Harrison School District Two in Colorado; I generally trust FIRE’s factual accounts in such matters, and I think its legal analysis here is spot on: The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to defending freedom of speech, is concerned by The…

• A federal judge has struck down a Texas law requiring age verification and health warnings to view pornographic websites and blocked the state attorney general’s office from enforcing it.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Sputnik Turkey management, which has fired 24 journalists after the strike action at the news outlet was announced, went to court against the strike, but the 4th Labor Court of Istanbul rejected taking a “precautionary measure” against the strike.

Civil Rights/Policing

• As of Friday afternoon, a Facebook event created for the protest had over 3,000 people listed as attending and nearly 8,000 expressing interest.

• Censorship is a priority for prison systems. Despite publicly claiming to be instrumental in the act of “rehabilitation,” correctional facilities generally engage in the sort of non-productive paranoia that ensures the only resources prisoners have are… other prisoners. And we’re all supposed to act like it’s a surprise when people re-offend. Or worse, exit this “rehabilitation” process more criminally-minded than when they were remanded to the custody of the state.

• Father İbrahim Uzun who received the body remains of his son three years later in a box said that he provided a blood sample back in 2020 in order for his son to be identified among the five people who were killed in an airstrike but the family was not informed although the results were completed.

• Walkouts by screenwriters and actors have meant less work in fields that cater to the TV and film industry.

• Three days of strike action have been announced, as well as a work to rule period.

• The British Medical Association (BMA) announced Thursday that in a recent re-ballot for continued junior doctor strike action, 98 percent of junior doctors in the UK voted in favor of continuing their planned strikes for the upcoming months.

• From yesterday’s decision by Judge John T. Copenhaver, Jr. (S.D. W. Va.) in W. Va. Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Inc. v. Morrisey (some formatting changed); note that the court upheld some other provisions of the law, which I discuss in a separate post: In March 2018, the West Virginia Legislature enacted House Bill 4817 [...]

• Lawyers for Sylvia Bongo, the wife of Gabon’s President Ali Bongo, on Friday said they filed a lawsuit in Paris over her “arbitrary detention” and that of her son Jalil. Sylvia Bongo and her children are dual Franco-Gabonese nationals. “Because they’re French nationals, France has jurisdiction,” Catalina de la Sota, a lawyer at Zimeray and Finelle Advocates, told FRANCE 24.

• Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall filed a motion Monday arguing that the state can prosecute those who assist people with accessing out-of-state abortion care. In doing so, he asked the court to dismiss a lawsuit brought by an abortion assistance fund contending that such prosecutions are unconstitutional.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• For years we’ve covered the silly triennial review process associated with Section 1201 of the DMCA. If you don’t know, Section 1201 is the part that makes circumvention of any “technological measures” a form of infringement, even if bypassing those technological measures is not for copyright infringing reasons. It’s actually even worse than that, because it’s not just the actual circumvention that could violate the rules, but any attempt to “manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in…” anything that can be used for circumventing.

Monopolies

Patents

• The level of transparency at the Unified Patent Court is far below what would normally be considered acceptable in civil court proceedings in most of the EU member states, says UK, Dutch and European patent attorney Joeri Beetz of law firm Keltie.

• For years, Amgen and Sanofi have battled it out across various European patent courts over cholesterol-lowering medication Praluent. Now the case’s latest twist has played out at the Unified Patent Court, where the two parties were in a race to file infringement and revocation actions via hard copy.

• A new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, was added seeking prior art on at least claim 10 of U.S. Patent 8,825,787, owned by Songbird Tech, LLC, an NPE. The ‘787 patent relates to an audio message-driven customer interaction queuing system for any public web page to allow web page visitors to utter questions into a browser-resident recorder application.

• A new PATROLL contest, with a $3,000 cash prize, was added seeking prior art on at least claim 3 of U.S. Patent 9,807,564, owned by Context Directions LLC, a Jeffrey M. Gross entity. The ‘564 patent generally relates to a method for detecting context of a mobile device, and to a mobile device having a context detection module, especially to detect that the mobile device is located in a moving vehicle.

• On September 1, 2023, Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination proceeding against U.S. Patent 6,389,473, owned and asserted by B.S.D Crown Ltd. (f/k/a Emblaze Ltd.), an NPE. The ‘473 patent relates to streaming video over the Internet.

Trademarks

• The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has called their 2.4 million square foot headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia home since 2005. But the agency does not actually own the cutting-edge facility located in the Carlyle neighborhood near the Potomac riverfront. Instead, the USPTO has leased the complex from New York-based real estate owner LCOR.

• Several months ago, the USPTO announced it would be downsizing and relinquishing 800,000 square feet of space. The renewed 5-year lease covers 1.6 million square feet.  Still a big footprint, but one reflective of how the USPTO’s workplace and workforce have evolved over the past two decades.

Copyrights

• Detroit’s forfeiture machine, major nuclear questions, and copyrightable materials.

• The government is releasing its draft regulations for Bill C-18 today and the chances that both Google and Meta will stop linking to news in Canada just increased significantly.

• Generative Artificial intelligence (GenAI) systems like MidJourney and ChatGPT that can generate creative works have brought a wave of new questions and complexities to copyright law. On the heels of a recent court decision denying registrability of AI created work, the U.S. Copyright Office recently issued a formal notice of inquiry seeking public comments to help analyze AI’s copyright implications and form policy recommendations for both the Office and for Congress. The notice is quite extensive and raises fundamental questions that many have been discussing for several years about copyrightability of AI outputs, use of copyrighted material to train AI systems, infringement liability, labeling AI content, and more. The Copyright Office’s inquiry is an attempt to respond to AI’s rapidly growing impact on creative industries. [Link to the Notice]

Gemini* and Gopher

Science

• So this turned into a little rabbit hole of digressionary research. At least the logic part, not any UI library or linking. So one thing that Aristotle is said to have said is that every claim must be either true or false with no other options. This tidbit got hard boiled into Western logic for a long while.

• Another thing that Aristotle is said to have said is that there are statements that are neither true, nor false. Whoops, is that a third choice? An example would be “the first cat born in the 22nd century will be named Socrates” which is (at this time) indeterminate, neither true nor false. Worse, you can have statements that are both true and false. Various paradoxes such as the old “this statement is false” apply here.

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